Bacon and Egg Man — The Cover

Oh. Hi. Happy New Year. Fancy seeing you here. There’s something I’ve been meaning to show you. Look at this. It’s a cover for a novel.

Bacon and Egg Man — February 2013

Bacon and Egg Man. It’s being released next month by the good folks at Premier Digital Publishing (more on them later). As you can see, my name is scribbled across the top of this cover. That’s because I wrote it. Yay for me, etc.

Let me tell you about this cover.
After signing on with Premier, I didn’t quite know what to expect. They primarily focus on ebooks. At the time of signing up, they had a print-on-demand component as well, meaning those of us who like paper books as well could go to Amazon or B&N.com, place an order and, after a short wait, get an actual book.

Now, those who’ve spent any time being rejected by publishers and doing research into self-publishing might realize this sounds quite a bit like some of the self-publishing outfits. But it’s not. You can’t just ring up Premier and say, “Hey, publish this.” Getting to them involved an agent and some lucky timing involving Mike Bloomberg’s ridiculous large-soda law. (Premier also now has a print distribution deal and is inching closer to the sort of e-pub/traditional pub hybrid that I think is going to eat the lunch of some traditional publishers.)

Still, I didn’t know what to expect in terms of scheduling, covers, etc. My worst-case scenario, I wouldn’t like what they showed me and I’d simply pay someone to come up with a design. (Which was fine, considering I didn’t have to wait three years for the book to be published.)

Either way, I was pleasantly surprised when someone from Premier emailed me and said they were about to put a designer to work on the cover and then asked if I had any ideas. Why, yes, I did! In fact, I posted a couple of laughably bad MS Paint ideas on the Facebook page. Aside from that one, I’d thought of another one based on a black iron skillet, which is an item in the book that jumped out for one of the Premier executives. Around this time, a friend had just joined Facebook and was using Magritte’s “Son of Man” as a profile photo. So. Bacon. Eggs. Frying Pans. Weird paintings.

So basically, I sent Premier a LESS coherent version of the previous paragraph and thought, “Well, this should be interesting.”

Then I received an email with the subject, “Cover Concepts.” My gut tightened. This would be the part where I’d hear a sad trombone and then start the process of finding (and paying for) my own damn designer. There were three concepts attached. It went like this.

Concept One: Hey, not bad. That’s sort of what I was thinking.

Concept Two: Dang, that’s kind of cool. I could live with that.

Concept Three: HOLY SHIT! I WANT! I WILL PRINT THAT OUT ON A COMFORTER AND SLEEP UNDER IT!

So, uh, concept three is what you see up above. And that will grace the cover of my second published novel, Bacon and Egg Man, to be released next month.